“April Showers Bring May Flowers” and all the other wonderful things that grow. That is what we will be exploring for the next couple of weeks. The children learned that not only do butterflies, chickens and birds have a life cycle but so do plants and flowers. This week we talked about parts of a flower and the life cycle of the sunflower. The children painted their own terracotta pots on Tuesday. On Wednesday we mixed the crushed up egg shells with soil, filled our pots, made a wish and gave our little seed a kiss before sowing it into the dirt. One child wished that their flower grows up to the clouds. Their wish just may come true as we planted Mammoth Sunflowers.

This week for our food tasting, the children tasted lemons. It was priceless to see the faces they made as they tasted the sour fruit. The activity began by giving them clues about the food. We talk about the parts of the lemon and used our senses to feel and smell before tasting. Most really seem to enjoy it even while puckering from its sourness.

Exciting News!
Our Painted Lady Butterflies have began emerging from their chrysalis!

Enjoy!
Mrs. Wilson and Miss Sharlene

Hip, hip, hooray! All five butterflies have emerged from their chrysalises. The children so enjoyed watching the life cycle of these beautiful creatures, and were especially happy to see them released on our playground.

Of course we had lots of work happening in our environment as usual. Some pictures are not being posted this week, as they show the children making presents for you. 🙂 With Mothers’ Day this weekend and Father’s Day next month, the children are working on their “Parents’ Day” gifts. Once complete, we will send them home for you to enjoy.

Monday and Tuesday the children arrived and began their day by checking on the caterpillars. Surprise, our caterpillars are now chrysalises! 

We are really enjoying spending more time outside. The children enjoyed listening to the book In My Nest by Sara Gillingham. The book talks about the different materials that the nest is made up of. This week we created our own nest using dough and pieces of nature that the children helped collect. We also made sugar water for our hummingbird feeder. The feeder is hanging on the tree right outside our window awaiting our small but fast feathered friends.

During a drizzly morning we took the children outside to the back field where we enjoyed a fun game of chase. The children were laughing as they were trying to catch Miss Sharlene and I. We really enjoy having fun with the children, whether it is dancing or running around together.

Miss Sharlene taught the children two new yoga poses this week. The Flamingo is a great pose to help with focus and The Shavasana helps with total body relaxation.

The children enjoyed showing their grandparents/special people around their environment. It was a pleasure to watch their interactions.

This week started off cold and rainy but thankfully is ending warm and bright. We hope you all enjoyed this weather shift as much as your toddlers did!

Along with the beautiful weather, we enjoyed a visit from our Community Service Volunteers. Rohan, Ashley, Katherine, and Tyler joined us for an hour this week to learn and play together. We explored everything we could find with magnifying glasses, played kickball, made sand sculptures, and rocked on the bench. Be sure to ask your child what they enjoyed most when visiting with their older friends!

Wilder’s mom, Elle Nicholson, visited our environment last week to provide a wonderful yoga experience for the children. Elle first captured the children’s interest with a book about yoga and then modeled several poses for the children. The children were so excited to participate and show off their moves! The cat, dog, butterfly, and snake are just a few of the poses they practiced. At the end of their session, Elle gave each child a flower. She warmly encouraged the children to smell their flowers as a way to inhale and exhale deeply. This was a wonderful experience for all of us. Thank you, Elle!

In this week’s pictures, we have a few children showing their matching work. We have six small vehicle figures that have matching cards. The children pick up one vehicle at a time, we discuss its name, purpose, and colors and find its matching card.

We have another matching work in the environment, which is a bit more challenging. We have a small bag filled with different wooden geometric shapes. The children are pulling the shapes out of the bag, naming them if possible, and then matching them to an outline drawing of these shapes.

The children welcomed some new friends to our class recently…caterpillars! Each day, the children delight in checking on the caterpillars’ progress. It won’t be long before we have painted lady butterflies to release into the wild.

To help us understand what is happening with our caterpillars, we are reading several books on the topic. The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle is their favorite so far. The children are also making their own butterflies from paper they have painted using marbles. Ellia demonstrates this art process in several pictures above.

Along with our caterpillars, we have several new works in the environment. The most popular activity is “fishing” with a magnetic pole. We placed magnetic fish-shaped puzzle pieces in our sensory bin, and the children used our self-made pole to catch the fish and drop them into a glass bowl. They love to do this activity over and over and over again!

The Upper Elementary and Middle School students invited us to their Science Fair today, and we so enjoyed attending! The toddlers listened patiently to the children as they explained their projects to them. It is so wonderful to be a part of the larger school community for these events…everyone enjoys being together and learning from one another.

 

We started the week talking about birds. I was amazed by how some of my friends could identify and name a few that we introduced into the environment. Some even told stories about these birds they have seen in their own backyard. A few of the backyard birds that were introduced are blue jay, cardinal, robin, woodpecker, oriole, warbler and indigo bunting. The first six years of a child’s life is a sensitive period for language. Identifying a thing by its proper name is extremely important to language development.

“The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.” – Confucius

We want to thank the Upper Elementary and Middle School students for inviting us out into the community and sharing their science fair projects with us. The toddlers listened to their presentations and some were able to explore some hands on experiments.

And we are back! Children entered the environment ready to explore the fun and engaging works on our shelves and full of energy and enthusiasm to see their friends and guides. Some of them were eager to share a couple of events that happened during their Spring break and all the fun they had as well.

They also found a new surprise! Miss Sharlene has joined us this week as our classroom’s new assistant! Miss Sharlene has transitioned well into her role and the children have been very open and excited to spend time with her and get to know her better. We are so glad to have her with us!

Continuing with our color mixing exploration, we introduced the concept of mixing red and yellow together! The magic has happened again and the children have visually discovered that when mixing these two colors we can create a new one, orange! This week we also started a new activity that brings great benefits to the children, Show and Tell. Through this activity children practice building effective communication and listening skills. Children brought special items that were the color orange and shared with their friends why the is object special to them.

As we know, studying nature and living in harmony with the Earth is an important part of the Montessori philosophy. Thinking of this and welcoming Spring, we have initiated our studies on chickens. We briefly read and talked about the life cycle of a chicken. The children giggled while watching the wind up chick hop around in the tray. Stay tuned for more chicken fun next week!

A favorite book this week was “Hungry Bird” by Jeremy Tankard.

Children learned the song “I Know a Chicken” by Laurie Berkner. They used egg shakers as we sang along with the music.

I want to thank Kristen (Maren’s mom) and Sarah (Hudson’s mom) for coming in and working with the children on the auction gift. The table is adorable! The children had fun getting their hands tickled with the paint brush and adding their hand prints to the table.

To finalize this note, I wanted to also say thank you so much for the kind words and support you all have demonstrated as I take the role of Head Teacher during Mrs. Hood’s maternity leave. Please know that we both work closely to make sure the progress in the classroom continues and your children are given the best care. We all miss Mrs. Hood and we wish her a speedy recovery from her injury and our best wishes on welcoming her family’s wonderful new addition very soon.